�I don�t think it�s even possible to train for something like that. It was just� act and react, act and react,� Conway continued, unaware of the thoughts flying through John�s head.
John smiled behind his mask. Everyone he�d talked to about the battle with Anubis�which he still couldn�t really wrap his head around; Anubis was supposed to be some mythological thing, a fairy tale dealt with in a Literature course or a grade school report on Ancient Civilizations, not some half-Ascended Goa�uld-Ancient hybrid bent on galactic domination or whatever�over Antarctica had, in their own way, said basically the same thing.
You had to be there.
It wasn�t like John didn�t get that. The needing to experience something firsthand to fully understand it thing. He, better than most, knew what that meant. The whole first year on Atlantis�not even a year; ten months, eleven tops�was time he could never fully articulate to anyone who hadn�t been there, who hadn�t witnessed what he�d witnessed, who hadn�t survived what he had survived. How could you hope to explain what it was like, watching a Wraith Queen literally suck the life out of your commanding officer with the touch of her hand to his chest? How could you explain the look in his eyes when he finally noticed you were there, begging you to take the shot, knowing it would kill him, because the end was what he was praying for, the alternative too agonizing to contemplate? How could you describe the desperation of people searching for a way to avoid being culled, the duplicity they were capable of to keep any tiny shred of hope to themselves, not necessarily because they wanted other planets to suffer the fate they were trying to avoid, but because they couldn�t afford to care about people they�d never meet on planets they�d never go to, not when there were men and women and children all sharing a nightmare scenario that struck with generational regularity? How could you describe the Athosians, the mist things that made them think they�d gotten home, the Genii who were enemies that started as potential allies and were maybe once again potential allies after the bomb-trade Elizabeth brokered, the Manarians who were deep in the Genii�s pocket and who gave Kolya the GDO and codes that allowed them to attempt the seizure of Atlantis during the storm, the kids on M7G-677 who killed themselves to control populations and sent their own children to other villages to ensure continued propagation, the Hoffans who had all but wiped themselves out with their wing-and-a-prayer miracle drug that ended up doing more damage than a culling could, the Daganians who double crossed them because of legends and beliefs that had all-but died out long ago on Earth, or about all the other cultures they�d encountered in their short time in the Pegasus Galaxy? How could you describe the visions brought on by the nanovirus before it caused your brain to suffer a fatal aneurysm or the images the Wraith were capable of making you see or the crushing feeling of guilt when you had to raise the shield over the Stargate causing at least forty men to simply cease to exist? There was just no way to properly convey what it was like. John got that.
The problem was, like his time on Atlantis was to the young Sergeant who had driven him from the SGC to his military transport, the battle over Antarctica had captured John�s interest.
Once again on the phone, this time in the tiny office space she�d been handed when it became apparent her working out of the Briefing Room was going to make her and a lot of SG teams crazy. As if that wasn�t a leap of logic that could have been taken the moment the President ordered that she return to Earth to do the debriefing thing personally instead of sending a proxy. She attributed the unusual burst of unpreparedness at the SGC to the fact that it was going through one heck of a regime change. Jack O�Neill had, literally, been with the program since the first mission, and the thought of him leaving, for good, was jarring to everyone who had known him since he had run SG-1. It jarred her, and she�d only really been his boss for a few days, not counting the time he spent in stasis, which she didn�t, not really. To people like Walter Harriman, who had the SGC so wired he had, quite honestly, freaked Elizabeth out a bit when she�d been in charge, the change from Jack O�Neill, the SGC�s favourite son, to Hank Landry, who had found out about the program one day on his front deck, had to be pretty intense. Especially since Elizabeth got the impression that, while Jack had known for a while he was going to be leaving, he hadn�t advertised it until the last possible moment. That seemed like something Jack would do.
�He�s going to hate that, General,� Elizabeth said into the receiver.
�Tough noogies," Jack said. Elizabeth rolled her eyes. He�d just had his promotion ceremony, been